


All In a Name

by Teceraca



Series: Robin Drabbles [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hope, prejudice mention, probably a little bit of canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22353904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teceraca/pseuds/Teceraca
Summary: "Who are you?" someone asks.The clouded image which comes to mind is not the forgotten name of a destined daughter, but a chosen identity.
Series: Robin Drabbles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1609078
Kudos: 3





	All In a Name

Raindrops fill the back of a little girl’s hood, falling cold and sharp from a cloudy sky. Teardrops soak the front clasp, streaming hot down puffy cheeks and clinging to her neck, no matter how she wishes they’d stop and begone. Instead they only steam up into the chilly air from her skin, still in the mist surrounding her, even once they vaporize. Small heels of boots dig into muddy ground, which dirties the cloak beneath her bottom where she sits, which had flecked the rest of it with earth while she ran for cover. Her profile makes a jagged line - bending at the legs and waist to cradle herself, braced against the wall; it matches the ragged sobs leaping from her throat to be muffled into sleeve cuffs.

Her stomach growls louder, anyway. Her nose and mouth are too full of secretions to smell the musk of the storm or breathe any other taste than the passing salty waves of her own ocean of sadness.

Her mother is gone. 

Whether dead or left behind on the other side of the river doesn’t matter. Either way she’s been **ABANDONED**.

She is a _child_. She doesn’t have the grace or standing of the woman she’d followed around from town to town, who helped and healed and advised any and all. No one knows her here, in this new country, in this next town.

_**No one cares.** _

Worse, _worse_ , they are _cruel_. They shove her aside when she asks for help. They close their doors and windows and pull the other children away when they see her tattered self coming. The terrible names still ring in her ears above rumbling thunder - even barely into her adolescence she realizes it is all because of her desert-descent skin, and the gray, grape, and gold patterns that she wears.

No wonder Plegia took to a war with Ylisse, if this is how they treat people like her.

The embers of **anger** fill her lungs to smoke out any more crying breaths. Glaring brown eyes peek out between knees. She’s done everything, _everything_!! anyone has ever asked of her. She learned to fight. She learned to cast. She learned to curse. She learned to cure. Bounced from family member to family member, then village to village once mother started this expedition, and she never complained! She _excelled_!

And this is where it brought her.

Alone and starving in the streets.

...Soon she’d have to learn to steal.

_Gods, are you even listening? Grimleal, I’ve been devout! Naga, I'm just a kid in your lands now, seeking sanctuary! Are you as divine and welcoming as they say?_ _Please just… send me a sign. Some little sign that there can be kindness and a place for me in this country…_

_…_

A liquid splatter from the fluttering of feathers widens her face from its scowl. Some native bird she’s never seen before has landed on the lip of a nearby barrel and dodders off droplets with strength it shouldn’t have. It tilts its tiny head and blinks beady little eyes. A chest of brilliant red-orange puffs up with pride, fluffing out so much bigger than it really is, then lets out all that air and settles smooth once more. It seems perfectly content to join her for a moment in drying out.

She cants her head the other way, blinks back. Admires such audacity of an animal in the face of a bigger nature. It shook all that water off of its wings like it were weightless instead of the heavy, warmth-leeching burden she feels sodden with. And yet, just in watching she feels revitalized. _Tomorrow_. Tomorrow will be better and brighter.

Tomorrow, then, she’ll have to find a library, that she might look up the breed of her avian acquaintance.

She would fluff up and shake it off and she would find her inner strength, too. She would find a home like that bird would find a nest. By building it somewhere suitable on her own, even if that home continued to be different each year, and she would do it with her own resourcefulness and all she’d learned and will learn from here. This she promised herself.

And so... several years later, when the grown woman would be rattled with another bout of uncertainty, another new slate by a memory wiped clean; when she feels lost, and pained, and without use or direction, and someone asks:

**_"WHO_ _ARE_ _YOU…?"_ **

The clouded image that comes to mind  
is the yellow-beaked dawn of a new day  
and the warm array like a sunrise on the breast of a horizon  
all shining bright to break through dreary browns and grays of fate that surround it  
to mark the coming of spring after a cold, harsh winter

The answer that perches on the branch of her tongue  
that stirs her soul as something appropriate  
that forms more familiar from her lips  
is not the forgotten name of a destined daughter

but a _chosen identity_

##  “I’m …Robin.”


End file.
